


Waste Land

by Mad_Max



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Era, Drug Abuse, Gay New York, M/M, Mary Lou Barebone is dead, Medical Procedures, Past Child Abuse, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, the Knick AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 15:40:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22498483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Max/pseuds/Mad_Max
Summary: The Matron of the New Salem orphan’s asylum has met an untimely death, and Credence will be damned if he doesn’t take his chance to escape a dull life as apprentice printmaker for the American Bible Society. But nursing at the Mac turns out to be a much bigger mouthful than he ever intended to bite off....
Relationships: Credence Barebone/Original Percival Graves/Theseus Scamander, Original Percival Graves/Theseus Scamander
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LotusRox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LotusRox/gifts).



> This is just the prologue! More tomorrow!

Ma died on a Tuesday around noon. They had all known she would not be long for this world. Her fever lingered from hours to days, her brow clammy. She sat with her favorites until their good health inflamed her temper, and then she sent them to bed without supper; it was just past eleven in the morning. She had not even bid them call for a doctor. 

Without fanfare, they drew the curtains black and prayed. Cold light flickered over the stone floors of the vestibule, casting shadows on the nothing. It was still morning, and the windows were too large, had never been fitted. Without her, they occupied a kind of stunned purgatory. A world of sound that rang out as though from underwater. Echo of the mop bucket on the bottom step, clatter of shoes. No one had done the weekly market run. The midday meal was to be cancelled. Hushed protest. Someone cried out, but what are we going to eat today, will we get nothing to eat at all? Somewhere through the rafters, like a flock of small birds, the little ones giggling. They sat in corners knees to chest with hands over exposed teeth, as though to hide.

If grief were meant to descend upon the inmates of the New Salem Asylum for the Friendless like a black cloak, it had unravelled. What life it could not smother, it held in static, resin-trapped. They were meant to have guilt, they wanted breakfast. They clamoured for a morning meal, a slice of bread, a cup of soup. Someone was singing psalms to the littlest, hushing older voices, don’t hit them, don’t strike them so, sh sh sh, you’ll have cake soon, there will be chocolate and milk.

Ignoring the obvious - that the asylum was abandoned, until the board returned from their winter holidays to appoint some new dictator.

Never minding the fact that there had never been chocolate and only seldom milk.

They waited, under the watch of their teachers, all orphans themselves who had stayed, who had nowhere else to turn. They drank water. They ate prayer.

Diffuse threads of mourning knotted each moment to the next, a bitter anger, hunger yowling in empty bellies.

And grief held just shyly back like the cloak of night over one of those days of unending Arctic summer that he had read about beneath the blankets that summer when they were all dying of flu or burying the ones who had died of it and no one had the time to hunt down heathen books or to catalogue a wayward thought.

In the week following her funeral, Credence put his own affairs in order.

He mended the hole in the elbow of his only suit and polished his boots. Sewed his armband from a dark scrap of curtain.

(Weep not - )

Combed and cut his hair.

Rid the rafters above the dining hall a final time of their stubborn pigeons.

( - grieve not - )

He drank coffee, now there was coffee. His scalded milk he gave to little Modesty to soothe her cough.  
(She was dead.)

That night, he surveyed the heaving flesh of the dormitory,

fragmented gas light on bodies under cotton sheets. By break of day they would be bodies

in secondhand cotton clothes, leather boots cracked, clattering  
of shoes on the steps, in the hall. They all had coughs. They had that fish-eyed look, glassy, freshly plucked from some puddle or other, wet lungs. Now she was dead they sometimes dared to laugh, little voices. Even those clattered, like broken shutters

on the windows, which were always locked.  
With gritted teeth, he removed the last stitches from the palm of his hand, pausing only briefly to survey the results of his handiwork.

(But weep bitterly for him who goes away - )

He tucked a needle and spare thread into a roll of socks and slung them all in the haversack on his shoulder.

(For he shall return no more to see his native land.)

He left before dawn and bid farewell of no one.


	2. Chapter 2

For days after leaving, Credence thought about home. He thought about its general structure, the early waking and late going to bed and the many hours of labour sandwiched between. He thought about the long corridors he had traversed from early infancy, and the way that his boots would clatter in their emptiness even when he took great care to walk quietly.

His new life, by comparison, seemed almost too easy. He lived on the charity of papists in black habits. He ducked his head at their rote blessings as he took their bread and coffee and soup. He prayed his thanks to God and slept in a metal cot in the flophouse for ten cents a night, an impossible sum that still set his head spinning whenever he thought about it for too long.

In those days, he stole often and recklessly. He let his hunger swallow his guilt. He told himself that he was fortunate for this new lot, for the death of Ma Barebone which had allowed him his escape, thank you O Lord Emmanuel, Jesus, and Satan.

The days now were longer than he was used to. At a loss for ways to fill them, he would occupy a back pew in the Armenian church on 36th, which was warmest and most foreign and therefore most unlike home and therefore made him think the most of home.

He thought about the airlessness of the dormitory of the Asylum in summer and the drafts in spring and winter, when they would be forced to sleep in their coats and were prodded awake throughout the night by their overseers as a means of ensuring they did not freeze. One boy once had not awoken, he remembered. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in the Asylum, before the flu, because everyone was certain that it would bring the board down on Ma Barebone, which would mean something called ‘reforms’, a word they all understood to equal more bread.

He had not thought about this for a very long time. He wasn’t sure what brought it up now that he had put it all behind him, but he felt certain that he had to tell someone. It struck him that he would not be able to attain full agency for himself until he had done so, like cutting the thread after a knot is tied to secure the seam, though he could not explain why. It struck him that what he really needed was to sit across from another human being and speak. That he had not spoken to anyone or been spoken to in weeks.

The memory stuck to him like flypaper until he resolved to sit in one of the boxes in the Catholic church where he took his soup and to unburden himself on the priest, who he knew was seated inside, concealed behind a metal grille and a velvet curtain and as well-cushioned as anyone could be to absorb his heaviness.

On the chosen day, he waited in a pew behind a row of old women with strings of pearls and wooden beads clacking as they prayed, all of the same kind with crosses on the end. None of this interested him. He was still thinking about the Asylum dormitory and the overseers and the incident with the frozen boy. It had happened years ago, when Credence was very young, and he remembered the shadows on the walls and harsh whispers of the overseers more than anything and lying awake in his bed for a long while after they took the body out in a white sheet.

When the time came to pass the subject of his preoccupation onto the priest, he sat himself carefully inside the pew and placed his holdall on his lap and then, after more thought, onto the floor at his feet as the priest cleared his throat. He tried to think of where to begin. Something about the Asylum, maybe, or about the fact that he could not sleep. Would he come across as pitying himself too greatly, and earn the ire of this anonymous bearer of the burden of other men’s truths? He tried to think if he pitied himself and decided that he did not.

Relieved, he cleared his own throat.

“I’ve never done this before,” he confessed quietly into the grille.

“That’s fine,” the priest responded.

Credence was surprised to hear the youth in his voice, a touch of what he thought was impatience. He realised that he had been expecting to offload himself on an old man with a white beard, in a foreign-looking papal gown, someone popish and ancient and much closer to God than the young man whose silhouette he could just make out on the other side of the box beyond the grille.

“I am not a Catholic,” he admitted, as though this were some great sin and not the other way around.

To his further surprise, the priest laughed.

“Neither was Christ, our Lord.”

“I guess not.”

“Well,” said the priest, “something brought you here. Do you have a confession to make?”

He thought of the Asylum, and Ma Barebone in her sickbed on the final day, her hand curled stiffly around the beaten leather spine of her Bible. She had wanted to be buried with it. That was one of her final demands. He reached for his holdall, just stopping himself from pulling it back into his lap. The idea of sharing any of this old world with a young, laughing priest jabbed him with panic like a spear through his ribcage. 

“No,” he said.

“No confession, just here for a chat?”

“I should go,” said Credence, rising. “I have no confession. I am not a Catholic. I’m sorry.”

“Sometimes the Lord sends us where we need to be, and it’s up to us to determine why.”

“I’m sorry,” Credence repeated.

“There’s no need,” said the priest. Credence could not be sure, but he thought that he heard the curtain rustle as he stood, and that a pale eye appeared through the small holes in the grille to blink at him. “Without a confession, there is no penance,” said the priest. He sighed. “But please pray for me, and I will pray for you.”

His prayer took form in dark dreams that left him sweating and trembling into the thin straw mattress of his bed in the flophouse, until he felt that he could no longer trust himself to sleep in the company of others. He went back into the church twice, both times on Sundays after the morning service, to eat his soup and watch for any signs of the young priest,who never came out, who seemed not to exist independently of the vague and shapeless shadowland of the confession box. Sometimes he wondered if he had not dreamed of that, too.

After a few days of this fruitless exercise, he went into the park instead and sat on a bench near the entrance watching people come and go. He averted his eyes from all of them but from passing men in neat suits, some with canes or newspapers or leather bags like he’d seen in the hands of the board president of the New Salem Asylum, a strict and joyless moneyman called Mr. Shaw.

Some of them reminded him of the elder Shaw’s two sons as he remembered them touring the building at their father’s heels. On those visits, they had spoken a lot about charity and orphan gratitude in loud voices that seemed never to have been shushed in infancy, as though by virtue of its own silence the Asylum were so deeply beneath them that it could not exist but to consume their noise. The other boys called them the Original Sins because they were, the both of them, haughty and unkind, much like the men in the park.

It wasn’t entirely their fault. They had belonged to a world much larger than any in the Asylum could imagine or remember, and they had been hated for that by all but Credence. He himself had thought maybe too often about the pale fuzz of hair across the older Shaw boy’s upper lip, 

had wondered maybe too probingly about all the other kinds of hair on the male body, and had stared long and hard enough that it got him into trouble on more than one occasion.

Just as he was thinking this, a young man with a thick moustache and a leather case on his arm stopped to return Credence’s gaze. They locked eyes for a moment before the other walked off a few paces, seemingly as though to carry on his way. Credence’s heart raced as he watched the young man’s retreating back, the swing of the leather case from his arm. Then he stopped and made as though to check his watch, and Credence knew somehow that this was meant to signal to him that he should get up off the bench and follow. He jumped up, feeling hot and sick, and ran the whole way back to the boarding house. Some of the usual men had already gathered outside to smoke as they did before curfew. They laughed as he skidded over the threshold, their smoke curling up the narrow tenement corridor after him as he took the stairs in twos. On the run from the law, someone said. And as the last dregs of their laughter followed him down the narrow aisle to his bed, he vowed never to return to the park again.

This resolution lasted only a day or so before he found himself back on the same bench before the park entrance, hungry and hoping for another glimpse of the young man who was now, of course, nowhere to be found. He knew that he should be smarter. He was acting on impulse, his longing for some kind of human touch overriding whatever had survived infancy of his better senses. They could arrest him, or the young man might have intended to lure him off to some secluded spot to beat him. As far as Credence could tell, that seemed the likeliest option.

He also knew that he should turn away from the park and go back into the city to find paid work. This he had been putting off so far as he could survive on stolen pennies and charity bread. He had run off from his indenture to the Bible House when he left the Asylum, a contract of meagre benefit only to the board, to Mr. Shaw and sons. He couldn’t be sure if his name might not be traced back to those papers somehow and that he wouldn’t be dragged off home or to jail for violating them. He would have to test fate soon; he could not live like a vagrant forever.

On the opposite bench, a little dog sat with tail wagging while its master brandished a stick and unclipped the lead from its neck. Both dog and man looked young, fresher and healthier than Credence had ever seen anyone look. The dog ran in circles, barking a yappy bark that left his ears ringing before taking off in pursuit of the stick while the young man stood laughing the way a little boy might laugh, a laugh that was purely happy, robust and unselfconscious. His hair was an odd coppery brown, neatly coiffed. He called for the dog in an accent that was not Irish, but maybe close to it, and then he turned and met Credence’s gaze by accident and smiled like they were both old friends, before turning back to pry the stick from his dog’s mouth. Feeling oddly achey, as though he had in fact been lured off and pummelled all over his body, Credence stood, gave a last parting glance at the park, and went back to his bed.

For weeks he existed in limbo, picking pockets and hovering furtively over waste baskets on street corners to catch bits of pretzel or apples with some meat still on the core as they were tossed in by men with leather cases on their way to and from work. Several times he was unable to make up the ten cents for his bed. On those nights, he slept in the park with the holdall buttoned under his jacket and his shoelaces tied around his ankles to discourage thieves. He found that it was better to sleep under cover of the decorative shrubs along the park’s perimeter, where the policeman was less likely to find him and nudge him off with his billy club. Otherwise he would be forced to wander off into the streets to find somewhere else warm to park himself until he could go to the catholic or the Armenian church in the morning.

It was on one of those nights when he made his grand discovery. His shoulder throbbing from the policeman’s “tap”, he had taken a blind turn further east instead of west, which was his usual route, and began to walk in the direction of the East River.

He knew that the Bible House was not far from here, and the Asylum not much further from that. His heart skidded at each street corner, but now that he had committed himself to walking towards the river, he thought that he would do it and then look out at the water for a while. It was very cold, and his brain had stalled somewhere half between sleeping and dreaming. He thought that he might throw himself into the river once he got there. He convinced himself that it would be warm, and he wondered again idly about the frozen boy who had not woken at midnight when they shook him. His name had been Tom, Credence thought, or Jim. Something ordinary. He thought that he remembered someone mentioning a boat out to Hart Island, where they buried all of the Asylum orphans, Credence knew, alongside the rest of the city’s paupers in unmarked graves.

He was deep in thought by the time that he reached Avenue B. It must have been nearing ten o’clock, but there were still people on the street here, mostly young men and some that he thought were young women until he looked closer and saw their cropped, oiled hair and grinning faces.

“It’s cold, _bambino_ ,” one of them said. “Go home, back to your mama.”

Credence stopped. From the back of his mind, he remembered the frozen boy and the talk of Hart Island. It felt a long way off from here. He felt his mouth open. Something about the entire street felt to him like a dream, the cold and the people in dresses and the walk to the river, which was just a few blocks away, he knew. He wanted to tell this person that he was cold. He hadn’t felt his fingers for at least the past half hour, nor his feet or his nose. He thought that he might try to swim out to Hart Island.

Something shifted in the demeanour of this stranger, her made up face, and it was only after she had taken his arm and told him to follow her into a lit-up building at the end of the block that he realised he had spoken it all.

Her name was Cassandra, she said. During the week, she went by a different name, but everybody who knew her knew that she was Cassandra. She had a younger brother who lived on Orchard Street with their grandmother who reminded her of Credence, and Credence was a funny name, and where did he come from, out West? When he told her that he came from the Asylum on Pike Street, she was quiet. She had read about that place in the newspaper, she said. How they had left all of the little orphan babies to starve for two weeks while the board sat in their holiday homes upstate and in Europe. It was a massive scandal, she said, and everybody was talking about it, everybody was abso-lute-ley horrified, just horrified by it, it was so medieval, so _old country_ , but it wasn’t surprising, of course. This was, after all, New York City, where they had let the little shirtwaist girls go up in smoke and shoved in ten families to a single tenement, and here they were, and did Credence have any money? He didn’t. She gave him a quarter and touched his cheek.

“How old are you, anyway? I don’t want to be responsible for the corruption of anyone’s youth,” she said. “This is the only place I know nearby that’s open, and no one will ask you anything if you mind your business. Don’t look anyone in the eye, or they'll think you want something else.”

“What else?”

“Tell them you’re at least nineteen,” she said.

“I’m twenty-two,” said Credence. He wanted to ask again what else they would think he wanted, but he thought that he already knew the answer, and he felt suddenly fully awake.

“That’s the spirit, but you should stick with nineteen.”

“No, I really am twenty-two,” said Credence. “It was my birthday last month.”

“Go inside and tell them Cassandra sent you,” she replied, as though he had said nothing. “You pay the quarter to the man at the desk for a private room. They’re shitty, and you’ll walk out with bed bugs in all your clothes, but you can sleep there almost all night, and it’s warm.”

“I don’t know how to thank you,” said Credence. Now that he was awake, he could feel the cold gnawing at his fingers and toes. He thought this might be a good sign, though it would hurt once they began to warm up.

“Just go inside,” she said, “and don’t look at anybody, and no one will bother you.”

Inside, the building was less dingy than Credence had imagined and much bigger than he had expected. Under the sickly yellow lamplight, he could see that all of the walls and the floors were tiled instead of painted or plastered, and this surprised him until he paid his quarter to the bored-looking man at the desk, who took it without looking up at him and informed him dully that he would find the baths to his left and the private rooms and changing room to his right, where he could deposit his clothes and shoes on the peg reserved for private room 3B.

His heart ticked up a beat. He was not alone in the changing area. There were two other men there speaking in low voices to each other. They stopped and stood up when Credence approached, nodding anxiously at him, he thought, before they cut out of the room in the direction of the baths. His fingers trembled as he untied the laces of his shoes. He knew now that Cassandra was somehow involved with this place, that they had maybe something in common that she had not recognised in him. He felt like a spy, like Tamar at the crossroads to meet her father-in-law. Cassandra had told him not to look anyone in the eye, and he had understood then but understood even better now that he would not take her advice. Like Tamar, he wished that he could draw a veil over his own face as he stripped himself stiffly of his jacket and vest.

He told himself that he would go to the baths first to warm himself up only, and even as he made this mental oath, he knew that it was a lie and that he would lock eyes with the first man he saw and see what happened next. He hung his trousers from the wooden peg on the wall. His body was shivering. He felt as though his stomach had been stuffed with sawdust, like a children’s toy. He felt squeezed.

He folded his underpants carefully and tucked them into the sleeve of his jacket. The unexpected exposure had sent Credence’s body into shock, flooded him with blood that had his fingers and toes burning painfully. He ignored them. He tried to forget that his name was Credence Barebone. He felt a deep dread and excitement at once, because he had realised now that he was here that he was not going to run away. He felt that he would do anything with any of the men here, if they asked him to. It had been over a month now since anyone had touched him before Cassandra had touched his cheek, and that last time had been only Ma Barebone with her hand on his wrist to steady it before she whipped his hands with the belt he had left hanging over his trousers on the peg for 3B.

At home, he remembered suddenly, after a whipping, all the little ones would stop in the hall to point and waggle their fingers and chant at the one who had been whipped as they passed, all those wet-lunged little voices rasping, shame shame dirty shame, everybody knows your name -

He didn’t know why he was remembering this now. He thought that he felt the opposite of shame as he crossed the threshold into the large, tiled bath room, where he felt rather than saw the eyes of other men following his naked body to the ladder. He felt the weight of own thing swinging between his legs. It had gone hard and blood-heavy. He wondered if anyone would say anything, but they had all gone back to staring at each other or at themselves, and now that he was looking he could make out the shadowy forms of other men on the benches beyond the lamplight along the wall, huddled together in writhing pairs.

Credence could not swim. This was not something he had ever given much thought to. It hadn’t seemed important in the Asylum, or at the Bible House. He was never going to be able to break into a career in the lobster or fishing industries, he supposed, but that had not felt like much of a loss. He didn’t know anything about lobsters or fish, anyway; he had never tasted them.

He didn’t have long to wait up against the wall of the pool before the water began to ripple around him. His fingers and feet were still burning, and now he thought that his cheeks must have joined them. The young man that swam past had the same coppery hair as the one with the dog in the park. He had a long, lithe back, long legs, dimples over his buttocks that made Credence want to avert his eyes as he swam another lap, but he did not. He watched the swimmer’s copper head disappear beneath the surface of the water and then reappear an arm’s length from him. It was the same young man from the park. He laughed this time, the same robust laugh, when he saw Credence’s face.

“I thought I might know you,” he smiled. “But I don’t, do I?”

“No,” Credence replied.

“I’ve seen you around Washington Square.”

“Yes,” Credence said, “with your dog.”

“He’s my brother’s dog,” said the young man. “Pickett. A silly little thing, but I’ve been designated _guardian in loco parentis_ while my brother is off in Panama, or wherever he is now. I say, you don’t fancy a swim, do you?”

“No.”

“Well, would you like a drink? I’m in company, but it’s not the sort that would mind.”

He gave a look over his shoulder towards the doorway, which Credence took to mean that they should exit the pool. He hesitated.

“We’ll be in 2A, if you decide to join us,” said the man with a knowing wink as he cut through the water to the ladder. Credence watched him towel his long body dry. He seemed to know and enjoy the fact that he was being watched. He took his time before wrapping the towel around his waist and walking off. He did not look back to see whether Credence had followed, and something about this confidence was annoying to him. He almost wanted to stay in the pool just to spite this friendly stranger, who seemed to think that he would follow because he had nothing better to do. But he had nothing better to do, so he walked through the water, shivering despite its warmth, and towelled himself dry as well before going off in search of room 2A.

The private rooms were laid out illogically, not in alphabetic or numerical order, but willy nilly. It took Credence three journeys up and down the stairs to find 2A, by which time he was panting and light-headed and nearly bent double by a sharp pain in his ribcage.

“Well hello,” said a voice through a crack in the door at his knock. It opened marginally to reveal a pair of brown eyes tucked deeply beneath two thick, dark eyebrows.

“Is it the boy from Washington Square?” another voice asked.

“Well, don’t just make him stand out there in the nude,” said a third, and Credence was startled to hear that it was a woman’s voice, sharp with reproach.

“You’re allowed entry,” said the doorkeeper with the eyebrows. He stepped back so that Credence could see the little smirk on his mouth. He was broader and more compact than the young man from the pool, and a little older, with a small, pointed nose that reminded Credence of a picture he had seen once in a newspaper article about the Duchess Consuelo Vanderbilt’s charity causes for women and children abroad.

The private room was a windowless cubicle with a bench and a chair. There were three of them cramped in there, including the man from the pool and the woman, who wore her hair in a short bob and a man’s suit that was not quite tailored to her form. They were all dressed, he realised, flushing and reaching for the towel around his waist.

“You ought to have told him he should put his clothes on,” said the woman, “poor thing looks scandalised.”

“I guess I forgot,” said the young man from the pool. He flashed Credence an apologetic smile.

“You should give him your coat, Mr. G,” said the woman.

She looked Credence directly in the eye as she said this, and he thought that he should thank her, but his mouth seemed to have lost the ability. He ducked into the coat in relief as it was handed over by its disgruntled owner. Mr. G, she had called him, the man with the eyebrows. He wondered if he should tell them that his name was C, or Tamar, or Judah. The young man was still watching him. He was staring at Credence’s shoulder as though he could see through it, and it occurred to Credence with a jolt of panic that he had walked through an entire roomful of men with the mess of his back on full display.

“You look like you need a drink,” said the young man.

“Yes,” Mr. G cut in, “I’m sure that’s exactly what he’s here for.”

“Well, it’s what he looks like,” said the young man, “so go on, _Mr. G_ , and give him one before he gets bored and runs off.”

They gave him the chair to sit on as a round of clear liquid was poured from a brown glass bottle in a paper bag. It had a strong solvent smell, like turpentine, and Credence just managed to suppress a gag as he lifted it to his lips.

“It’ll only make you wish you’d never been born when you wake up tomorrow,” said the young man with another wink. He took his glass and downed it in one and held it out for another pour from Mr. G, who raised his eyebrows.

“I’m taking a leaf out of your book tonight,” said the young man pointedly. There was an odd tension between the two of them, a tightness to the skin around Mr. G’s eyes. The young man’s, Credence noticed, were red-ringed and a little swollen, almost as though he had been crying sometime earlier, but he laughed his deep laugh again after Mr. G had looked away. He was handsomer for it somehow, than he had been in the park. There was a vulnerability to him in the unhealthy light from the lamp screwed into the wall that gave him a Buster Keaton-like depth, an air of melancholy. He looked like Mr. Shaw’s younger son sometimes did when his father shouted at him in the presence of the Asylum inmates, or in front of Ma Barebone, like something had been taken from him that he dearly wanted.

“Give us your stage name,” he said, shifting his gaze back onto Credence. He blinked, and all the melancholy was replaced by a cool kind of friendliness. “Not your Christian one,” he said,“or your Hebrew one, or whatever you are.”

“Tamar,” Credence supplied instantly, and now the woman laughed. She had a kind laugh, not as careless as the young man’s. When she took Credence’s hand and told him that she liked him, he found that he believed her and that he wanted to try the awful liquor they had poured out for him in the hopes that it would please her. He let her hold his hand through his splutters.

“What happened here?” She turned his palm over and pressed her finger into one of the scars there. “You work in a factory, or something?”

He yanked his hand from her grip.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s a personal kind of question, isn’t it?”

He realised that the other two were watching him with interest now, and the room had become quiet. Mr. G, his empty glass rested on his knee, followed the line of Credence’s arm down from his shoulder to his palm, and then over to the woman, who looked stricken.

“I’m sorry,” Credence echoed her. He knew that he should leave now, that he had dropped himself into a world too deep to wade through, and he had the sudden and dramatic sensation that he was going to drown if he did not run back out through the door. He tried to explain about the Bible House and the printing press, hoping as he did so that they were ignorant of the kinds of machinery employed by a printing house, and that they wouldn’t question this explanation for his hands, or for the mess of his back, which the younger man must have seen, because he kept glancing at Credence’s shoulder.

“Healed up nicely,” said Mr. G. He seemed not to share any of the woman’s qualms and took Credence’s hand in his to peer down at it almost as soon as he had set his glass onto the tile floor. “Factory injuries can be nasty. These were deep. You’ll have some nerve damage. Do you?”

“I stitched them.”

“Stitched them with what?”

“With a sewing needle,” said Credence, prying his hand back.

“You stitched them with a sewing needle and what, silk thread?”

“Mercerised cotton,” said Credence. He didn’t know why he was explaining himself. He placed his hand under the flap of the coat on his lap and sat back on the bench.

“You stitched lacerations on your hand with mercerised cotton and a sewing needle,” said Mr. G. “You ought to have gone to a hospital. You could have given yourself an infection.”

The blatant disapproval in his voice sparked something like defiance in Credence’s chest, as though he had swallowed another half glassful of liquor. What right did a stranger have to berate him like a parent, like he had any authority over Credence’s life or his doings? He felt his cheeks flushing and the eyes of the other two on him as he straightened to defend himself.

“I cleaned everything with vinegar first. I'm not so stupid,” he snapped, and then he deflated into the coat.

He had never spoken back to anyone before, and it left him winded. He should never have come into this room, with these strangers and their illegal liquor. He wished that he could leave here and go back to his own private room to sleep until someone woke him to kick him out. Would they try to stop him if he stood up and left? He couldn’t see why they would, they hardly knew him, and they were as complicit as he was in being here. He could leave now and never see them again, and he would probably be all the better for it, but the young man had started laughing again. He was drunk, Credence realised. Utterly drunk, red-cheeked. He was too handsome for this cheap tiled room, and his companion was too well-dressed, and the woman was simply too decent, and they all disgusted him.

He wanted to say something unkind to them, because they had made him feel foolish. Because he had been foolish, and he felt terrible and sick again as the liquor sloshed around in his empty belly. He felt lightheaded as though he had just climbed back up the stairs. He wanted to tell them that they were all going to be laughing in the flames of Hell, as Ma Barebone would have done, but then he thought that he would probably be there with them, and suddenly the room and the tiles and the liquor and the three unlikely people in it felt like a prison. Like he would never escape them.

The young man was still laughing. He’s a self-taught student of medicine, he said, he's read the Greeks. It’s perfect for you, your soul mate, Perce, you’ll have to take him on. 

His laughter now was brittle, not the robust, healthy rumble it had been in the park or in the pool, and the man called Perce and Mr. G shook his head. He was still staring at Credence’s hands in what must have been disapproval. They would all be laughing in Hell, Credence wanted to say. He knew that he must say it, or he would be just like them. He was just as drunk, he realised. That was the light-headed feeling and the sick rocking in his stomach, or most of it. He opened his mouth to say something, his throat seared. He was going to vomit, he realised with panic, and the raised eyebrows of the man called Perce, and his broad hands reaching out were the last things that Credence saw before his world went black.


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning found Credence with a relentless headache. He opened his mouth probingly. It was dry, and his teeth felt oddly soft.They ached, and his eyes ached when he opened them and saw that he was lying on a sofa, an uncomfortable sofa, in a dark room he had never seen before. There was a pillow scratching his left cheek. He rolled over, groaning. Something thick and wooly itched his feet. When he sat up, he discovered that he was fully clothed. Someone had even gone to the trouble of giving him socks.

He knew in the back of his mind that he must be in the house of one of the strangers from the baths, and that he should be terrified. He had heard all the stories about missing boys and bodies found by washerwomen in backalleys. He was alone, and no one would know where he had gone or that he was gone at all. No one would miss him.

None of this spurned anything like terror in the slow-moving current of his consciousness. His body was tired, and the effort of fishing for his own thoughts left him too winded to worry. Worry was, at any rate, for those who had something to lose in death. Credence had often thought - privately, between himself and God - that even Hell might be an improvement on the general shape of his life. At the very least, he had been promised a lot of warmth and an eternity free of Ma Barebone.

He knew that he should leave anyway. He bared his teeth. They still felt soft, and the room seemed not to want to lie still for him when he tried to rise. By the anemic light through the shutters, it was still early morning, frostbite cold. The room inside was still and shadowed and comfortably warm. He glanced at the door. Most likely locked. The needlepoint pillow, now itching into his elbow, was ruthless. He nudged it and watched it fall onto the plush rug beside the sofa.

It was unlikely, he reasoned with himself, that a person who planned to murder him would have laid him out beneath a blanket on a piece of furniture, in a room as rich as this. He thought that he should remove the socks, though they too seemed to indicate goodwill on the behalf of their owner. He would much rather cold feet than all this itching, but he could not make his body perform the appropriate gestures for removal. He lie back again.

As soon as he closed his eyes, he was asleep.

His new sleep was shallow and fitful, reeling with odd dreams that left his heart racing into the hard cushions of the sofa beneath his chest, the pillow digging into his cheek, damp from his sweat. When he woke again, he saw that the shutters had been flung wide from the windows, flooding the room with afternoon light. His headache had worsened. This was the penance for intemperance, Credence supposed, as he sat up.

Now that he was properly awake, he could see that the sofa, with its hard cushions, was covered in a kind of soft, ornamental fabric. It was deep green to match the floorboards, which had also been painted in the same shade to match a large painting stretching across the walls instead of paper. He stood shakily so that he could approach the nearest wall and run his fingers over a painted orange on a lush tree, a pale bird in flight, a golden flower. Whoever had done them had a masterful hand. As the sunlight hit them through the now-open window, they appeared almost real to him. The sky behind this painted foliage deepened from sunset gold to a deep green near the ceiling, glowing as though touched by magic. He traced over the thin bark of a sapling with a bird on its lowest branch. He traced its feathery red breast, its beak. The plaster was warm, as though someone else had just been there and rested their hand over the same spot. Alarmed, he went back to the sofa and sat down.

It was a while before the owner of all this luxury appeared, startling him from his awe for it. Credence heard his footsteps echoing down the hall first; he tried to stand.

“Ah, good,” said the man called Perce from the doorway, “You slept in so long, I was beginning to worry we’d knocked your head a little too hard on the door of that cab.”

By light of day, he was a little older and handsomer than Credence remembered. He had very fine, straight hair which was short and grey on the sides but peaked over the top of his high forehead. He wore a smile on his mouth that didn’t quite reach the upper portion of his face, and he continued when Credence did not respond, “You’re heavier than you look. And you probably shouldn’t take up drinking as a regular habit. You’re not very good at it.”

“I’m sorry,” Credence replied.

“Don’t be. Plenty of men handle their liquor in worse ways than you.”

“I mean,” said Credence, “I’m sorry that you had to carry me. Was I very ill?”

“Deathly.”

“And I hit my head?”

“Just after you vomited in my lap,” said Perce, through the half-smile still fixed to his thin lips.

“I’m sorry about that too.”

“Well,” said Perce, “We’ll both be sorry if we don’t get some lunch in us. I was going to send you in a tray, but since you’re up, you can take yours with me.”

He turned without waiting for Credence’s response and walked out into the hallway. Credence followed him slowly. He wanted to take in the marvel of this room before departing from it forever. He tried to study the oranges, and then the birds. He closed his eyes as he left so that the dreamy green of the evening sky imprinted itself in their darkness. He opened them. Perce was waiting for him in the hall, his smile hooked into the side of his cheek. When he saw that Credence was behind him, he turned without another word and lead them both down to a door at the far end, which opened on a room even brighter and larger than the first. It was not painted, he noted with a small surge of disappointment. It had large windows overlooking a narrow back garden that was brown and bare, with the exception of a small tree. Credence watched a pigeon take flight from one of its branches until the scrape of a chair across the floorboard brought his attention to the table, an ornamental wooden beast more befitting of a banquet than the meagre boiled egg and toast laid out at its head.

“Take a seat,” said Perce. He gestured Credence into the chair he had pulled out for him. His hand remained clasped over the polished back of it even after Credence had sat down. “Do you eat pork, bacon?” he asked gruffly. 

“Yes, sir.”

“Doctor, actually,” said Perce. “But you can call me Graves for as long as you’re seated at my dining table.”

“And then ‘doctor’ again, when I stand up?” Credence asked. He had to steel himself against the churning in his stomach. It was the kind of question that would have got him belted at home, but Graves hardly blinked at him on his way to ring a bell that was fixed to the wall beside the door. 

“That’s the ticket,” he said. “You’re not half slow. We might be able to find a use for you yet.”

Credence said nothing. Too many things had happened in the space of the last twenty or so hours, far too many departures from the typical narrative of his days for him to process any of it with any kind of clarity. He wondered if this were not all some kind of a dream. Maybe he had jumped into the river as he’d planned, and this room with its slumbering back garden and the other with its dreamily painted walls were something his brain had invented to spare him from the horror of drowning. He tried to imagine himself in the river, how he would look, a thin body in a scrappy secondhand suit, clutching a cotton bag to his chest which held his only worldly possessions: his spare roll of socks, his sewing kit, and Ma’s Bible. It was too bright in this room, and the winter sun through the window was too warm. The image washed. He reached out to touch the gleaming surface of the table and found it as unyielding as any other of its kind.

“How’s the head?” Unnoticed by him, Graves had taken up the chair at the end of the table and was in the process of cracking open his egg with a small spoon. “It looks sore,” he said in answer to Credence’s hesitation. “There’ll be an aspirin with your breakfast. You should take it with water, and then you should eat and bathe.” Having said this, he scooped a mouthful of egg into his mouth, chewed, and stood. “And then we’ll talk,” he said. “You’ll find me in my office. It’s just down the hall.”

The entire morning felt unreal to Credence, like it had taken place behind a screen in the back of his mind. Graves hadn’t warned him that his breakfast would arrive on the platform of a dumbwaiter, and so he had nearly upset the glass of orange juice in his surprise as it slid into view.

Ma Barebone, in her final days, had taken her meals similarly. He pushed himself to forget about her as he prayed and then picked through the abundance of options. Not even for herself had she ever allowed anything as extravagant as an egg to grace the table, and never aspirin, which he took with his coffee despite the directive he had been given. Egg, he had to admit to himself, was disappointingly rich, the yolk like a yellow slime on his tongue, nothing like he had imagined. In the end, he finished only his slice of buttered toast and his coffee, which was already pushing the limits of what his upbringing had allowed. Then he sent his breakfast tray back down in the dumbwaiter and went off in search of Doctor Graves.

“Sit down,” Graves directed as soon as Credence’s feet had crossed the threshold to his office.

Credence sat.

“I’m going to offer you a job,” said Graves.

Credence blinked back at him as he took his seat The office was darker than the other rooms but with the same heavy, ancient-looking furniture. Here the shutters were drawn tightly over the windows, so that the sunlight was forced through in narrow bars that danced in his eyes as they adjusted to the dimness.

“I want to know more about you,” said Graves from behind his hulking desk. “Before I decide exactly what to offer you. Let me see those marks again on your palm.”

Something about his tone suggested a habit of briskness and of giving orders without having to wait for them to be followed. Now that his headache had cleared some, Credence felt himself bristle at this expectation.

“How did I come home with you?” he asked in answer.

“In the back seat of a cab, as one does.”

“At the baths, I wasn’t wearing any - ” his breath faltered as the realisation of it hit him, “ - my clothes.”

“Oh, you dressed yourself all right,” said Graves. Something in his expression shifted, the hardness falling away for the briefest moment. And then it passed, and he yanked open a drawer on his desk. He seemed to sense Credence’s relief, because he shook his head and laughed and offered up a case of cigarettes as he said, “It was all perfectly decent and depressing, if you need to know. You said you were going to sleep in one of those roach-ridden rooms. You said quite a lot, actually, though it’s not surprising you can’t remember any of it. Do you smoke?”

“Yes,” Credence lied, taking one.

“You’re an orphan,” Graves continued, lighting Credence’s cigarette and then his own with a motion so fluid that Credence nearly missed it. He spoke rapidly, like someone used to being listened to for long stretches of time without interruption. “Come out of that infant’s prison,” he said, punching out the syllables as through a timestamp card. “The one in the newspapers,” he added, gesturing widely to clear the air of smoke as Credence coughed. “And you’ve experience nursing flu patients, mostly children. You were too young to fight in the war. Your mother died of diphtheria, and you’re in some kind of legal snafu. You told that to Goldstein. She was very impressed with you, become something of your champion. She’s the one you can thank for this offer of a job.”

“I don’t understand,” said Credence. The fact that he could not remember anything else from the prior night should have alarmed him, he supposed, somewhat more than it did. But the morning had been strange enough already. Bizarre, really. And the conversation had progressed so quickly that his mind raced to keep up. He felt nauseous again, despite the bracing effect of toast and coffee, and he knew that he should say something else. He was being offered a job, unexpectedly. He had been given shelter for the night in a stranger’s home, and he had apparently made a fool of himself before that. Words of thanks built themselves up like wooden blocks in the back of his throat and stuck there.

Graves huffed. “Nothing much _to_ understand. You are a much chattier drunk than you are hungover, but you seem clever enough otherwise. I’m in the market for a surgical nurse, and while it’s unorthodox - to have a male in the position - I think we can make good use of you, with a little training.” He rubbed the tip of his cigarette over the edge of a little dish before shoving the thing at Credence to do the same. “You’re a quiet one,” he added thoughtfully. “I like that. And you are discrete,” he raised his bushy eyebrows as though daring Credence to disagree, “and I trust that you can keep a secret.”

“I’ve never been to any place like that before,” Credence answered, catching on to his meaning as on to a life raft. He watched Graves’ fingers roll the tip of his cigarette until it flattened between them. “I’m a practising Christian,” he added for good measure. This earned him a long look.

“It’s not any business of mine what you do in your free time.”

Too late, he realised he shouldn’t have lied so readily, because Graves seemed to have read the truth off him instantly. And anyway, he had arrived in nothing but his bath towel at their door. He could not have stated his purpose any more obviously had he come in the company of a herald angel blowing trumpets.

“It’s getting late,” Graves said, most likely having read his silence as insolence, because he frowned around the tip of his cigarette. “Let’s take a look at those hands.”

Credence coughed again. The cigarette smoke sat heavy on his tongue, like the plumes of coal smoke that would leak out of the stove in the Asylum whenever it had been Credence’s turn at scraping the ash that built up in it constantly, making the fires cold. His hands, again. He knew, somehow, that he could refuse to do as he was bade and that Graves would never comment on it, and he also knew, with the same incomprehensible certainty, that he was not going to do that. He coughed a second time, to buy himself a moment, before laying his lit cigarette gingerly into the little dish of ash and extending both of his hands, palms up, over the desktop for Graves to inspect.

“You did a fine job,” Graves said after a pause in which he traced the line of a long scar that stretched from the base of Credence’s pointer finger to the joint of his wrist. His skin was warm, almost hot, and the roughness of his thumb over the knotted scars surprised Credence. With a little jolt, he realised he had expected Graves, a man of wealth and of learning, to have the soft hands of a Shaw boy, the kind that had yanked his hair and flicked his nose as a child when their father was distracted.

“I’m well-practised,” he said thickly around the knot of this memory.

“You’d make as good a tailor as you would a nurse,” Graves agreed, with the same almost-smile as before. He shook his head, breaking their eye contact, and blew a mouthful of smoke towards the shuttered window, where it swirled into little wisps of golden stripe and then nothing. “But, this is not a factory injury.”

“It’s not,” Credence agreed.

“It’s not a very old one, either - this here.” He tapped the long scar and another near the base of Credence’s thumb before letting go. “Is that your only suit?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes, Dr. Graves.”

Graves huffed. This time, Credence recognised the sound unmistakably for a laugh.

“Well, all right,” he said, brushing his cigarette against the dish so that ash fell off in snow-like flakes. He looked newly at ease leaned back in his chair, with the cigarette loose between his fingers.“All settled then,” he said. “My housekeeper will show you out and give you an advance on your pay. I’ll see you on Tuesday at the corner of Tenth and Third Avenue. Well-rested and in a new suit,” he added, gesturing for Credence to go.

“And Barebone - ” His call caught Credence in the chest on his way out the door. He stopped and turned back. Graves was not looking at him. He stubbed his cigarette out into centre of the dish. “Nevermind,” he said at length, “you can go.”

Only once he was outside in the street, with his boots on his feet and his pocket full of more bills than he had ever seen in his life, did Credence realise that he could not remember having told any of them his name.


End file.
